Mama TBB

TBB sat alone at the the Halloween Salsa Party, but a fella asked her to dance.  He was a beginner too and she helped him,  but after a few dances he stopped coming back.   It looked to TBB like someone had made it their mission to set him wise that he was dancing with a tranny, and so he would look like a fool to his friends if he came back.

It reminded me of a story my mother told of the biddies at at a local senior center who watched the men dancing with a woman they thought was “really a man,” and how angry they were at “him” for “fooling the men” (read “poaching the men.”)

Having not grown up as a girl, I know that one of the things I don’t have a lot of practice in is the way women “compete” (read “fight’).   Women have to know how to get what they want, and using social pressure is a key tool.   I suspect that the transwoman at the senior center didn’t feel the need to bond with the women, which is why she was both accessible & fun to the men, and outside the social pressure of the women.

Later in the evening she hooked up with friends from her class, who danced with her some, even though they were advanced and she was intermediate.

Things changed when she talked to a 26 year old gal dressed as Dorothy and asked why she wasn’t dating the 30 year old dressed as Indiana Jones.

The gal warmed.  “Well, he’s a friend, and I don’t want to. . .”

“Just do it,” said TBB.

It was a few minutes later that the younger woman announced that her Dorothy part was crooked, and asked TBB to help with her hair.

“She was comfortable with me, and assumed that I knew what to do,” TBB told me.  “That’s exactly the kind of simple intimacy with other women that I need, so I fixed her hair.”

“You are always better as Mama TBB,” I told her.  “People understand you when you care like a woman your age.”

“You’re right,” she told me, right before she signed off to take a call from her daughter who had to fix her own brake lights.

TBB and I aren’t in prime reproductive age anymore, which means we aren’t competing with other women for the hotties.  We are in the age of mothers, though without the skill set we would have if we went though our own hottie period.

But we both know that a key part of our identification as women is the identification as a mom.  Sure, maybe a drag mom or a grandmother, mothering the mothers, but a mom.

And that’s where much of our power lies.